Katrina... so small, so fragile, so vulnerable. Today, while I was reminding yesterday night’s session, I was thinking of her like a soft puppy that doesn’t understand why his owner is beating him up. He’s incapable of feeling hate, incapable of biting. He stays sitting there with his big pleading eyes, without shedding a tear, perhaps not even realizing his soul is breaking into a thousand pieces while the world turns into madness all around. I can still feel how she gets smaller and smaller, how darkness absorbs all her energy until she seems no more than a frightened child in a corner.
Yesterday night I recalled another episode of Katrina’s terrible story. It wasn’t completely new, as I have been suspecting for months that she must have lived a building’s collapse, probably a church. In that occasion, I wrote it down in English first. Curiously, it was also in August (to be more specific, on August 17th, 2015).
“Something strange happened today. I was sitting on the sofa with my cat, nodding. Lately my only physical issue has been the lack of sleep (and a bit of a headache), due to the loud music we had during all the weekend in our street. I started to feel depressed, with desires to cry and a heavy ache in my heart. Felt like a past life but I couldn't pinpoint which.
Suddenly I started to get some flashes. A boom, lots of white dust, rubble all around. It looked like I was inside a building, with high ceilings (a church?). The right part is shadowy, in the left I see light coming in. I feel the fear and the anxiety, I just want to go out, and I start coughing because of the dust. Seems there were not too many people with me, though I had another flash of an old man trying to get a hold on me. I'm not sure of his intentions, but I think he only wanted some help.
I see the palms of my hands blackened, I try to remove some rocks with my fingers, but they're too heavy.
I tried to get some data, but nothing came. The feeling was that I was already very depressed, but my soldier still lived (not for long). I was wearing a skirt, possibly grey.”
I did manage to get out in the end. I needed some minutes to recover my strengths, seated on the sidewalk. But the shock didn’t go away so easily. I returned to the barracks and my workmates tended to my injuries. I don’t know when all this happened. If I am to heed my first impression, it was shortly before my boyfriend’s death. I do know it was an incident that contributed to my depression. My emotional state was close to an anxiety attack, becoming madness little by little. I often see myself huddled in a corner, on my bed, located beneath a window. I think I wish I could go back in time, I wish I could go back to Prague and don’t move away evermore, I wish my boyfriend was near to hold me tight, I wish there were no war, I wish I could put an end to everything... It is like feeling the energy is leaving you with every breath you take, something tries to engulf you, you are being dragged to the abyss and there is no way of letting go. I only wanted to cry and shout, cry and shout, I was filled with rage, impotence and despair, and I couldn’t even find someone to blame, because I was even aware that officer who abused me was also a victim of the war.
Tears rolled down relentlessly while I was meditating, but I keep feeling Katrina didn’t shed any. She was completely paralyzed, without knowing what to do, without knowing how to react, filled with fear, hopeless, alone as she had always been... like a small insect trapped in a spider’s web.